HRW: Nigerian Army Killed Hundreds of Civilians
Local Editor
Nigeria's Army mowed down as many as 347 Muslims last December while swooping on the followers of the country's leading Shia cleric, Sheik Ibrahim Zakzaky, a special investigation has found.
A report released late Monday by the government of Kaduna state, where the killings occurred, found that the army fired at supporters of Sheik Zakzaky, who is currently detained.
Although the military and government declined to comment on the topic, the report said Zakzaky's supporters had taken over a highway, and were parading peacefully.
"There are families who lost children," said the Wall Street Journal citing Ibrahim Musa, spokesman for Zakzaky's Islamic Movement in Nigeria, as saying on Tuesday.
"The government is trying to justify the unjustifiable."
In this regard, leading human rights groups decried the military's attack as "disproportionate" and reported systematic crackdown on Nigerian Shia Muslims.
According to New York-based rights body Human Rights Watch [HRW], Nigerian forces committed several instances of bloodshed against the country's Shia community in mid-December 2015.
The organization further stated that the Army slew Shia children and opened fire on the unarmed youngsters with no provocation.
The killing of the children, HRW reported, was followed by another incident, in which Nigerian forces killed as many as 1,000 Shias in raids on three centers in the city of Zaria in the Kaduna State between December 12 and 14.
The Army's version "just doesn't stack up," Daniel Bekele, the HRW's Africa director, said. "At best it was a brutal overreaction and at worst it was a planned attack on the minority Shia group."
For its part, the HRW's fellow UK-based rights group Amnesty International said it would soon release its own investigation into the Army's treatment of Nigerian Shias, adding that "anyone suspected of criminal responsibility for these crimes must be brought to trial."
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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